Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting tomcat:catalina package, versions [,5.5.35)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
medium
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Mature
EPSS
65.13% (99th percentile)

Do your applications use this vulnerable package?

In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.

Test your applications
  • Snyk IDSNYK-JAVA-TOMCAT-31364
  • published10 Jun 2015
  • disclosed5 Jan 2012
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 5 Jan 2012

CVE-2011-4858  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-399  (opens in a new tab)

Overview

tomcat:catalina Apache Tomcat before 5.5.35, 6.x before 6.0.35, and 7.x before 7.0.23 computes hash values for form parameters without restricting the ability to trigger hash collisions predictably, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) by sending many crafted parameters.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package

References

CVSS Scores

version 3.1